(a) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus for separating nanoparticles, and more particularly, it relates to a nanoparticle separating apparatus that can separate nanoparticles from impurities in a nanoparticle dispersion, and a nanoparticle separation method thereof.
(b) Description of the Related Art
As a technology that composes, assembles, and controls a material of an atom-sized or molecule-sized unit and measures and studies properties of the material, nanotechnology refers to a technology for a material or an object of a 1 to 100 nanometer range in size, in general.
Such a nanotechnology material has unique optical/chemical features due to the size of a nanoparticle, and the nanotechnology has been applied to various fields since it also has excellent mechanical/electrical features. Particularly, the nanotechnology has been applied to various fields including electronic and communication fields, material/manufacturing fields, a medical field, a biotechnology field, an environment/energy field, and an aviation field.
As stated above, industrial utilization of the excellent features of the nanoparticle has been regularized, and accordingly, a process for massive synthesis of nanoparticles in a liquid state has been actively researched and developed.
However, when the nanoparticles are synthesized, a material that has been injected for synthesis and experienced no reaction or a reaction has been stopped in the middle of a process remains as an impurity and thus a separation process should be performed to remove the impurity, to thereby highlight a unique feature of the nanoparticles. Conventionally, a method of iteratively performing a process for collecting nanoparticles by precipitation and redistributing the collected nanoparticles has been used, but such a method is not environmental-friendly because it causes a waste of a massive amount of organic solvent for iterative redistribution, and the method is not industrially suitable due to a deviation in separation caused by different workers and different work environments.
In order to solve such a problem, a method for moving nanoparticles from a stream of as-synthesized nanoparticle dispersion to a stream of a desired solvent using an electrophoretic method has been suggested, but the nanoparticles cannot be wholly separated.
Meanwhile, a method for installing a minute electrode in a channel, attaching nanoparticles to a surface of the minute electrode using an electrophoretic method, and then redistributing the attached nanoparticles to a desired solvent has been suggested (Korean Patent No. 10-1404158). However, such a method has a manufacturing process problem in down-sizing a cross-section of the minute electrode to increase a specific surface area and has a limit in mechanical durability of the minute electrode. Further, since the nanoparticles need to be moved and attached in a direction that is perpendicular to a length direction of the channel, the channel should have a sufficient length for processing a massive amount of nanoparticles, and accordingly, equipment cannot be down-sized.
The above information disclosed in this Background section is only for enhancement of understanding of the background of the invention, and therefore it may contain information that does not form the prior art that is already known in this country to a person of ordinary skill in the art.